


fifteen love stories for casimir di sabbia

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Series: punchworld [4]
Category: The Punchlines
Genre: AND IT'S ADVANCED, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, IT'S DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS, M/M, curtainfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 14:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16874685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: “Are you,” Aurelio asks him a year later in a bar in Magiyaroszág, staring longingly at Casimir’s mouth, “are you ever going to change your mind?”“I’m not known for it,” Casimir replies, staring down at his drink.





	fifteen love stories for casimir di sabbia

**Author's Note:**

> so this is.....not.....gonna make any sense if you're not in our fandom of seven, but i'm a completist so I'm posting it here anyway. 
> 
> BUT IN CASE YOU WANT CONTEXT:
> 
> Casimir is a Tiefling cleric, raised in the toxic environment of the Renaissance Catholic Church.
> 
> Elís is Lady!Jesus, and she has maybe just impregnated Casimir, a male cisgender Tiefling cleric, with her holy baby. Or something. It is as yet unclear. 
> 
> Ilaina is a high elf thief, and Casimir's best friend. 
> 
> Aurelio is Casimir's childhood sweetheart.
> 
> The Punchlines are the rest of the party: Agni the Remnant (read: Jewish) warlock, Max the teenaged sorceress who grew up in something like the Addams Family (Heimlich is her butler, who is also a friendly lich), Screech the mermaid bard, and Zoltán the gnomish wizard.

**Or: FIFTEEN LOVE STORIES FOR CASIMIR DI SABBIA**  
  
1.  
  
Casimir learns he’s going to have a child when the Ordo Crystallis is seeking refuge at the Miller household, and the lich he cannot quite think of as Max’s childhood tutor gives him a friendly pat on the top of his head and says “You look ready to burst! When’s the due date?” and then Max asks him what he _means_.   
  
It turns out months of terrible migraines and worse than usual hunger mean that a few hours later Casimir is gripping Ilaina’s hand so hard he must be bruising the bones in her fingers while Heimlich cheerfully directs Screech to cut open his skull with her cleaver. “Don’t fret, little priest,” Heimlich says, even though Casimir is doing his best to ignore him. Ilaina is a poor distraction for once; she looks sick. “If you die, I’ll just bring you back. That is, if your lady friend doesn’t beat me to the punch!” He gives an affable chuckle, then orders Screech to start cutting.   
  
He does die, in fact--or it feels like dying--but Elís brings him back. Screech tells him later that at the first blow, light burst out of the wound, growing brighter and brighter with every blow thereafter, and then there was an abrupt wail and she could see into the tiny pocket dimension crammed inside Casimir’s skull, the crying baby reaching up into the world. He wakes up with his head back in one piece, just as Screech, sniffling hard, places a tiny baby girl onto his chest.  
  
She is brown-skinned, like Elís, with tiny perfect pointed ears. She looks like a Half-elf, and nothing at all like him, except maybe for her little shock of curling newborn hair. She’s utterly impossible. He’s never loved anyone more in his life.  
  
Heimlich is scolding her. “Now, that was a very inconsiderate place to gestate,” he’s saying in something remarkably like a coo. “I hope you’ll be nicer to your father in the future.”   
  
“Shut up,” Casimir rasps through the lingering pain in his head, the tight ache in his chest. “She’s perfect.”   
  
Heimlich sniffs, amused. “Like father, like daughter,” he says, and claps his hands together, nodding at Screech, who’s openly weeping now. “Come on, let’s heal the one who fainted.”   
  
Casimir barely registers this, although later he’ll wonder where Ilaina went. Daughter, he thinks, amazed. His _daughter._    
  
He names her Isabella della Luce.   
  
Isabella is a good name, a Reman name, but one he has no real history with. He won’t name her di Sabbia. She is not a bastard, and--neither is he. That is not the legacy he chooses to pass on. He is Moira’s son, and she is Moira’s granddaughter. If he were Belial, he would be of Light and not of Lies. From the very beginning, it is clear that his daughter is a child of Light.  
  
He winds up calling her Bella. Sometimes Bell.   
  
2.  
  
Casimir met Aurelio for the first time when he was fifteen, and first fell in love with him and then betrayed him to the woman who would become Dominica Sextus.   
  
Tieflings age as quickly as humans. Saints age as they please. Dwarves age slowly. Aurelio is still a very young man when Casimir lays eyes on him again. He is thirty-five, and Bella a sweet, babbling toddler. After they stop trying to kill each other--Aurelio at first refuses to believe that Casimir is no longer loyal to the Pope, and Casimir cannot believe that Aurelio can be trusted, bearing as he must a personal grudge against him--Aurelio finds his way into Casimir’s bed.  
  
Specifically, he finds his way into Casimir’s bed while Casimir is not in it, on the strength of some significant glances and some banter that Aurelio personally feels was sparkling.   
  
“This is absolutely inappropriate,” Casimir says, crossing his arms over his chest as he waits for Aurelio to put his clothes back on. He’s flushed so deeply the scarlet skin of his face is nearly violet. “You’re a _child_.”   
  
“I’m eighty-nine,” Aurelio says, deliberately taking his time. Casimir might as well see what he’s missing. “That’s….what? Fifty years older than you?”    
  
“You’re barely of an age with Max,” Casimir says dismissively, making a sharp gesture with his hand at the next room of the inn, and the twenty-year old sorceress sleeping within it.   
  
“I’m old for my age,” Aurelio says with a smile he has been reliably informed is roguish, “and I’ve known you since you were twelve.”   
  
“I was fifteen,” Casimir replies, because he’s never forgotten anything about that summer. “And given the circumstances of our meeting tonight, I think I can say with some authority that you are not old for your age.”  
  
Aurelio finishes lacing his trousers, and shrugs his shirt on with a slow, deliberate movement. “It’s been almost twenty years since the first time I thought about bedding you,” he says easily, in Dwarvish. “Surely that counts for something.”   
  
“You’re an arrogant child,” Casimir says coldly, but his _ears_ are violet. It’s adorable.  
  
Aurelio leaves his shirt unlaced. “Hm,” he says, and takes a step towards Casimir. Casimir immediately takes a step back. “And you’re a bastard, but I don’t hold it against _you_.” He bends over to pick up his boots. “No need to tell me you didn’t feel the same.”   
  
“I didn’t,” Casimir says, and it is painfully obvious that he is lying.   
  
Aurelio smiles at him. “I thought you were supposed to be a spy. Are you going to tell me you’re not interested, or just keep telling me how old I am?”   
  
Casimir sets his jaw, then holds the door open for him. “Good _night,_ Aurelio.”   
  
Aurelio pauses at the door, looking up--and up and up--at him. “Hasta pronto, Casimir,” he says.  
  
3.  
  
Bella is a saint. This is not a title, it is a taxonomical fact; a biological reality that designates her a child of Elís. As a saint, Bella ages quickly, rocketing through infancy and childhood only to pause at sixteen, lingering there for a full year just when Casimir was afraid she would grow up and leave him behind before a human girl would have left childhood. It means that there are painted icons of her in the holy city, and children who pray to her in rural villages, and when she answers those prayers, she glows faintly.   
  
It also means she dies young. Saints often do.  
  


4.  
  
Aurelio did not grow up to be a priest. He grew up to be a revolutionary working against the Reman state, so of course Agni and Zoltán like him. Screech is wary at first, but warms up to him as soon as she reads a few of his pamphlets. Max isn’t willing to trust anybody who grew up with Casimir, which is fair enough. Bella adores him. And Ilaina? Well--  
  
“Do you trust him?” she asks Casimir.   
  
“I don’t need to trust him,” Casimir says immediately. They’ve agreed many times not to trust anybody.  
  
“That isn’t what I asked.” She smiles, not at him, and it is infuriating.   
  
“We—“ she looks up so quickly that he hesitates. “We only need to work with him for— a little longer.”  
  
“Pity,” she says, but she doesn’t sound sad about it. “He might actually succeed with you where I can’t.”  
  
He frowns, and decides not to ask her what she means. He knows, whether or not he wants to.  
  
*  
  
When Aurelio leaves Casimir’s room, carefully re-clothed and cursing in Dwarvish under his breath, he expects the hallway to be empty. Luckily, Aurelio had survived enough espionage to spot the rogue watching him from the shadows.   
  
“I take it you’re the elf,” he says, charming just in case.   
  
“Did my ears give me away?” she replies sweetly.   
  
“Do you always sleep in the hall, or am I just lucky enough to catch you on watch-duty for Casimir’s team tonight?”  
  
She must be at least partly serious, because she ignores the dig at her trance.  
  
“If you’re looking for a warm bed, mine is the only one that’s ever available in this team.”  
  
Aurelio gestures over his shoulder with his thumb. “The mattress was relatively comfortable.”  
  
“I specified warm.”  
  
Her smile doesn’t falter. Aurelio tries very hard to not roll his eyes, and only fails a little.   
  
“You knew him once,” she continues when he makes no move to answer or leave. “How long ago?”  
  
“Too long ago,” Aurelio answers her.  
  
5.  
  
After Casimir dies, Elís makes him the offer she’s been considering since she put her child in him. She did it with a thought, not a touch, but it is an intimacy she has granted no one since her first husband. After Casimir and Bella help her to end that marriage--with the help of her Father and his Agni and the being known as Max Miller--and throw her former Lord out of her heaven, it feels to her like a natural conclusion to the story.  
  
She needs a partner--she has never ruled without one--and she can see very clearly the good that they would do together, the Remnant Queen and the Tiefling King, a whole golden future unspooling before her. Together they would heal Lucrezia Valentin, and wipe out the harm she brought to the world. They would rebuild the Church in their image: every race and every creed, fire and storm harnessed to the mission of healing, not conquest. They would rewrite the rules--no longer would her holy water burn, no longer would her crosses scar. Bella would lead a new generation of saints into the world, in service of their new mission. And after all, doesn’t she love him? Doesn’t he love her?   
  
But Casimir looks at her, ashen, and says: “I--cannot.”   
  
Elís is not an all-knowing goddess, or a jealous one. But she _has_ known Casimir his entire life, and he _did_ swear a vow of marriage to her when he was sixteen years old, even if he didn’t mean it in the way she is asking now. She knows that Casimir would cut out his own heart with a knife, if she asked him. She is...surprised.  
  
“...May I ask why?” she asks, and she doesn’t know it, but she has never sounded less like a goddess and more like a woman.  
  
He looks at her, agonized.  
  
“Speak freely,” she says, gentle. “Your answer could never alter the love I bear you, or the gratitude I owe you.”  
  
“I love you,” Casimir says, eyes wide, “and I will serve you forever, but--I can’t--you’re not-- _I’m_ not--” He can’t seem to make himself finish, so she tries to finish it for him.   
  
“You don’t desire this body?” She gestures at herself, about to remind him that the flesh is a mask, and as her husband he would know her true self, but he’s already shaking his head, looking even more pained.   
  
“ _My lady_ ,” he says, sounding almost outraged, “You are perfection itself, and I would never--to be so honored is more than I or anyone should hope for, but--”   
  
“But?”   
  
“I can’t argue with you,” he blurts out. “I can’t marry someone I can’t argue with.”  
  
She blinks.   
  
Casimir rushes on, as if he has to get it out before he loses his nerve: “I learned a great many things in my life,” he says. “I learned the difference between love and--living. I will love you always, but I--cannot live with you.” He looks miserably down at his feet. “I’m sorry, but I--I worship you too well for that.”  
  
“Oh,” Elís says. Her cheeks heat a little. “You only had to say.”  
  
He looks up at her, something simpler and truer than the future she’d foreseen shining out of his eyes: faith. “And my Lady,” he says, “You deserve that, too.”   
  
“Someone to argue with?”   
  
“An equal partner,” Casimir says. His mouth twists a little--not quite a smile. “A friend.”  
  
Elís resolves to spend the next thousand years or so mulling this over. 

6. 

  
Aurelio doesn’t go away.   
  
Oh, he doesn’t _travel_ with them, but he keeps turning up, like a bad penny.   
  
They need to infiltrate the Czar’s court? Aurelio turns up on a mission for the Elísians, undercover in the Gatolunyan ambassador’s retinue. He’s there to help Agni steal the Remnant ghetto register, he’s there to argue with Ilaina about the best way to get into the Czarina’s rooms, and he’s there to look up at Casimir with amused pale eyes when they get trapped in a confession booth together.   
  
“I could have tried kissing you to deflect suspicion,” Aurelio whispers, and Casimir would suspect him of deliberately leaning closer, but there isn’t room for two adult humans in a confession booth, let alone a nearly-eight foot tall Tiefling and a full grown Dwarf. Casimir is sitting down; Aurelio is in his lap. There isn’t any ‘closer.’ “It might have been easier.”  
  
“ _Stop talking_ ,” Casimir says, and squeezes his eyes shut. Later that night they shout at each other about power and abuse and age and almost blow Aurelio’s cover after he insists that Casimir couldn’t take advantage of him if he _tried_.  
  
They need to retrieve a holy artifact from Spanalfarheim? Who do they find in the tavern but Aurelio, who swears he’s just home visiting his tias and he’s happy to babysit Bella while they visit the palace. Bella’s too excited to see him for Casimir to say no, so Aurelio takes Bella on a tour of the palace library, and she’s only been alive for three years but is already taller than he is and reading as many books as her father will allow her (and more books that Max gives her behind Casimir’s back. No, a three-year old child probably shouldn’t read the Necronomicon, but Bella isn’t _really_ a three year old child, now _is_ she, Casimir?), which is why it’s really not Aurelio’s fault that Bella opens the wrong book and summons a demon. Aurelio doesn’t let any harm come to Bella, but he almost dies before Casimir arrives to heal him and then rage at him, Bella clutched safely in Screech’s arms.   
  
“Careful, Casimir,” Aurelio says with a faint, bloodied grin, “Or I’ll start to think you care.”  
  
“Shut _up_ ,” Casimir snarls, but he rests a gentle hand on the side of Aurelio’s face, and adds: “Thank you for saving my daughter,” and Aurelio looks up at him, startled into the kind of openness that would make anyone look young and vulnerable.   
  
*  
  
“Are you,” Aurelio asks him a year later in a bar in Magiyaroszág, staring longingly at Casimir’s mouth, “are you ever going to change your mind?”  
  
“I’m not known for it,” Casimir replies, staring down at his drink.  
  
“Well,” Aurelio says after a long moment, voice wavering a little, “Promise you’ll let me know if you do?”   
  
Casimir tips his drink back. “You’ll be the first,” he says.  
  
“...Casimir,” Screech says hesitantly, after Aurelio goes to bed, her face troubled, “Are you sure--?”   
  
“--I’m not discussing this,” Casimir says, and slams his empty glass on the table.

6.

  
At four months old, Bella is already the size of a toddler, and speaking in babbling Common. She’s a restless sleeper, and wakes him up in the middle of the night crying. He gives her a bottle, mixed with a fresh drop of his own blood--Elís says she’ll grow out of it, but right now, while she’s young, she still needs it. He takes her up to the deck of the Waka-Taua, because she’s still most easily coaxed into sleep by the rhythm of an adult walking.   
  
“Why are you growing so fast, little one?” Casimir whispers to her. She’s curled up, half asleep on his shoulder. “What’s the rush?”  
  
Bella blinks up at him with her enormous dark eyes. His eyes. The eyes his mother recognized. “Do you have things to do?” he asks, still in that quiet hush.   
  
“Yes,” she says, and she already sounds older, almost sad.   
  
Casimir brushes one of her delicate pointed ears with his free hand, and thinks that Elís meant her for a great destiny, and that’s why she did this. “You don’t have to,” he says, low and fierce, and he doesn’t think about whether it’s a blasphemy, or not part of Elís’s plan, or for the greater good. “You don’t have to live for anyone else. You can be a child as long as you want. Living for yourself is enough, Isabella.”   
  
But she’s already fallen asleep.  
  
7.  
  
Really Casimir should have expected that the first person to break into his cell after a month of enhanced interrogation in the Castel Sant’Angelo would be Aurelio, even though he hasn’t seen Aurelio in at least six months, and had no idea he was anywhere near Rema.   
  
Aurelio looks terrible, dark circles under his eyes, his skin waxy and pale. He sees Casimir and lets out a small sharp huff of breath, the kind of sound you make after you’ve been struck in the chest.  
  
“Aurelio,” Casimir says in alarm, and it’s good that he’s sitting down because Aurelio drops the axe he’s carrying, crosses the cell in two quick strides, and kisses him.   
  
It’s not a particularly elegant kiss--Aurelio’s hands are fisted in Casimir’s tunic, which hasn’t been washed in a month and is stiff with dried blood, and the angle is putting pressure on his dislocated shoulder, and none of it matters because Casimir is very tired, and in pain, and he has wanted to kiss Aurelio for well over half his life. He shudders hard and kisses Aurelio back.   
  
“She told us you were dead,” Aurelio says a minute later, breaking away to breathe. His lips brush Casimir’s hairline.“She mounted a head on the city walls--it looked like yours.”   
  
“Oh,” Casimir says, dazed. “It wasn’t, though.”   
  
“You,” Aurelio says desperately, “are so stupid.” Then he says out loud: “Yes, I have him,” and that makes sense a moment later when Zoltán appears in the doorway, trailing a floating disc.   
  
“Uh,” Zoltán says, eyebrows raised as high as they’ll go, “I could come back later?”

*  
  
That night, after Casimir heals himself, glad in a bone-deep way to be out of the anti-magic field they’d kept him in, he takes a very deep breath and does his best to explain that just because Aurelio caught him in a moment of weakness, he hasn’t changed his mind. He is forty years old, and a father, and Aurelio is a--terrorist barely out of his tweens, and nothing’s _changed_ just because Casimir was feeling vulnerable.  
  
“ _Why not_?” Aurelio shouts, and he still looks miserable, even though Casimir healed him after healing himself. “It’s not about me, so stop pretending it is.”   
  
The truth is Casimir has had a daughter for five years, and although she’s aged more quickly than any human child would--she says it’s because she needs to, whenever he’s asked her why--he’s painfully aware of how vulnerable she is. How much she needs things like love, trust, warmth. Denying her those things would be heinous, unfathomable. Casimir understands, for the first time in his life, that he should not have been denied those things when he was a child. He understands, for the first time, that the lack of them may have damaged something in him, maybe beyond repair.  
  
“You’re right,” Casimir says, and swallows hard. “It’s not about you.”  
  
Aurelio stops, looking caught.   
  
“It’s me,” Casimir says. “I--don’t want to.”   
  
“But you _do_ ,” Aurelio says unhappily. “You do want to.”  
  
There was a time when Casimir would have done anything for Dominica Sextus. _Anything_. And Dominica Sextus just spent a month trying to flay him into betraying his child. How many times has Casimir let love and loyalty lead him astray? How many times has he followed his heart at the cost of his beliefs? How many people has he harmed because of the stupid hungry thing beating in his chest?  
  
“I can’t,” Casimir says, and it comes out very final.   
  
*  
  
“So,” Agni says, sitting down next to Casimir on the steps, where he’s watching Aurelio teach Bella to flick a knife down from her sleeve to her hand. “Is it a Christian thing?”   
  
Casimir looks at him askance. “Is what a Christian thing?”   
  
“Not letting yourself be happy,” Agni says, nodding at Aurelio and Bella, and Casimir’s jaw tightens.  
  
“Still not discussing it,” he says, heart sinking a little.  
  
“Hm,” Agni says. 

8.  
  
Bella dies saving the world.   
  
She is six years old, and also sixteen. She looks sixteen. She spent almost the whole year being sixteen, after skipping through thirteen to fifteen in a matter of weeks. But Casimir only got six years with her.   
  
Max gets him out. He doesn’t really remember that part--everything after Bella closing the barrier between the worlds is lost, although he will see that part over and over again in his dreams, until the day he dies. He has a vague memory of trying to jump in after her, and Max Chill-touching him to stop him, yelling in his ear when he tried and failed to stand again. “She wouldn’t want this, Casimir. She made a choice,”--and Max’s voice breaks-- “And, and it’s awful, but she did it, and all you can do is respect it. You can--you can honor her, okay? That’s all you can do.”   
  
The next thing he remembers is Elís telling him not to grieve, that Bella is safe with her.  
  
 _I will never forgive you,_ Casimir tells her, his Goddess who _looks_ like Bella, like the woman Bella will never grow up to be. Briefly he hates her as much as he loves her. _Why did you give her to me at all, if you were going to do this?_  
  
She touches his face with the very tips of her fingers, and the touch sears through him, a small agony. _She says to tell you she loves you,_ Elís says softly, _and she’s sorry, and she will see you soon._  
  
He’s not sure if it’s hours or days later when Casimir finds himself in Aurelio’s room at the inn. He’s sitting in the bed, propped against the headboard, and he doesn’t remember at all how he got there. Aurelio is sitting beside him, a bowl of bloody water and a washcloth on the bed between them. Aurelio has one of Casimir’s hands in his, and he’s carefully washing the blood away. Casimir flexes his hand automatically, and Aurelio looks up at him. He looks raw from weeping.  
  
“Oh,” Aurelio says softly, as if he realizes Casimir’s really here now, and hasn’t been before. “Oh, mi corazón. Lo siento mucho.”   
  
Casimir stares at him, and then he moves without thinking. The bowl of water goes crashing to the floor, splashing Casimir’s bare toes, but he barely notices. He kisses Aurelio, drags him in until they’re almost close enough to make Casimir forget what he just saw, kisses him with enough single-minded desperation that he almost forgets he has a daughter at all. Aurelio makes a small sound into his mouth, and Casimir chases it, arches eagerly into the hands that skim up his shoulders, and thinks that he could lose himself like this, thinks that he wants nothing more than to lose himself.   
  
But they have to breathe eventually, and Aurelio cups Casimir’s face in his hands, and he says: “Not like this.”  
  
Casimir can’t catch his breath, can barely understand what Aurelio’s telling him. There’s a devastated little tug at the corner of Aurelio’s mouth just before he says: “I know. I can’t believe it either.”   
  
“But--I want it,” Casimir rasps.   
  
“I’m sorry,” Aurelio says, and curls one hand in Casimir’s hair, pulling his head down to Aurelio’s shoulder. Casimir is breathing so harshly he’s nearly sobbing, and Aurelio’s other hand finds its way to Casimir’s ribs. He kisses Casimir’s forehead. “We’ll talk about it later, if you want,” Aurelio says, very softly, and Casimir struggles to breathe against his shoulder.   
  
At some point he must send for Screech and Ilaina, because when he untangles his hand from Casimir’s hair, Screech and Ilaina are there.   
  
“We have you,” Ilaina says quietly, and Screech doesn’t waste time with words, just reaches for him. Casimir starts weeping as soon as she touches him.   
  
Aurelio slips away.  
  
9.  
  
In heaven, Bella is always sixteen. There is a part of Casimir that has never stopped grieving the fact that he will never see her at twenty, at forty, perhaps with a child of her own.   
  
Casimir also died before he had a chance to grow old. He does not see the irony, although sometimes Moira points it out for him. Moira is younger than Casimir, but older than Bella. In heaven, as in hell, there are no lies about what you are. While the dead frequently choose to assume the shape of a younger self, they cannot make themselves older than they were in life: there are limits to how much a person can grow after their life is ended. Casimir knows it is not true that in heaven there is no change--but there is much, much _less_ change than there was on Earth. Sometimes Casimir looks at the two of them--his mother and his daughter--and thinks they look heartbreakingly alike, even though they share no recognizable features.   
  
They are an odd family--perhaps even the oddest in Elís’s heaven, with the young matriarch, the middle-aged son, and the teenaged saint--raised in different cultures, born of different races, barely overlapping in their time on Earth. They do not live in the same dwelling: Moira has kept her own home for many years, and Casimir sometimes finds it almost unbearable to be with her for too many hours on end. She can be a very blunt reminder of all the things he would rather forget. In addition, Moira is occasionally visited by a young man with Casimir’s eyes, and Casimir and his father do not really know what to say to each other.   
  
(“Hello,” Casimir said flatly, when they were introduced, and watched the young Reman man flush a deep red and then become an old Reman man, looking at Casimir with a very familiar ashamed dignity. Casimir hates him.  
  
The man had lived to a ripe old age, and married a girl from his village, and had another family. He still lives with them, in another part of heaven. Casimir would have stopped him from visiting Moira altogether, but Moira has forbidden him from interfering.)  
  
Sometimes Casimir worries Moira is lonely, because none of her other friends and family made it to Elís’s heaven--she is here only for love of him--but Moira waves this away. She has her family: she has him, she has Bella, she has a Dwarf and a Goddess for children-in-law, or something like them. Moira does not tell him that sometimes she worries about him, for the same reason: all his stories are about people he will never see again. For all that he lived his life in the Church, all the people he loved seem to have lived outside it.   
  
Bella also does not live with Casimir, although she has a room in his house. She spends most of her time with her mother, although she is always happy to see him. She has duties to attend to--he doesn’t understand them fully, but he knows her work is important.   
  
Casimir lives alone for a very long time.  
  
He is unprepared for how happy it makes him, to turn the corner in the square one day and see Aurelio again, in the face of an old man.   
  
“Oh,” Casimir says, frozen where he stands, a simple delight blooming in his chest, “It’s you.”   
  
He’d died knowing he would never see Aurelio as anything but a very young man, and now there he is, weathered and sun-browned, with a white beard and thin skin stretched over his familiar features. There are laugh lines worn into his face, and a pale strip of skin where a wedding ring should go, and all the care of a full and complete life resting on his shoulders. He’s looking at Casimir like--like he’s always looked at Casimir. Something settles in Casimir’s chest, some deep anxiety eased at last.  
  
“Is that what you have to say to me?” Aurelio asks him, and steps forward, taking Casimir’s unresisting hands in his. He’s smiling, and his smile is the same.  
  
Casimir kneels down in the dust of the square, and Aurelio lets go of him, but only to cup Casimir’s face in his hands. “You look--different,” Casimir says inadequately, and Aurelio snorts.   
  
“I forgot how eloquent you are,” he says. “Do you mind?”   
  
“No,” Casimir says, painfully honest, and doesn’t close his eyes when Aurelio kisses him.  
  
Aurelio often makes himself younger, so he and Casimir are at last of an age. It satisfies him, to finally live the life that time and Dominica Sextus stole from them. But Casimir has never stopped loving the face Aurelio wore when he died, the proof that Aurelio was happy and fulfilled and still wanted to come back to him.   
  
10.  
  
Elís loves her youngest daughter, as she loves all her children.   
  
She loves everyone in her heaven, but she has a soft spot for Casimir and Bella, who helped her to break free of her Lord. Sometimes she joins their family in Moira Belacqua’s house for dinner, where Moira has painstakingly prepared food for Tiefling, Dwarf, and Half-Elf palates alike--and laughs quietly when Moira accuses her of being too skinny and heaps more pasta on her plate. Bella complains about their work--she is a good miracle-worker, but still very tender-hearted about cruelty and free will--and Aurelio and Moira debate classical Reman poetry. Every so often Casimir gives her a look of private amusement, like he’s briefly forgotten she is his Goddess, and is only thinking of her as family. He always remembers, but Elís cherishes those small moments.   
  
It reminds her of being alive.  
  
11.  
  
Casimir has imagined dying many times. He thought for a long time that he would die for Dominica Sextus--and then he thought instead that he might die for Elís, or later for Bella. He never thought it would be like this.  
  
“Don’t you dare,” Ilaina is saying somewhere over his head, in a flat panic. “Don’t you _dare_ , Cas. Heal yourself, or-- _fuck_. SCREECH! AGNI!”   
  
Casimir tries, he does. But he’s too tired--there’s nothing but a tired spark between his fingers. Nothing nearly enough to make a difference. “Sorry,” he says instead, with the last of his fading strength. “Sorry, Lani.”   
  
“Don’t be sorry, be--Casimir,” and her voice changes, going deep and serious, the way it only does when she knows it’s too late. “Casimir, I won’t forgive you if you do this.”   
  
Casimir wonders vaguely if she’ll remember the last rites. She’s heard him say them often enough.   
  
 _See you_ , he says, or tries to say, right before it all goes dark.   
  
“Don’t you fucking die on me,” she says, and her voice cracks. “I won’t forgive you!”   
  
He doesn’t listen to her, true to form. 

She cobbles together the last rites, tripping over the words that sound wrong in her voice instead of his, and ends with “And if that isn’t good enough for you, you selfish goddess, then Corellon take him for me.” 

12.

Casimir sleeps with Aurelio for the first time six months or so after he loses Bella, and again the next time they meet, unexpectedly in Normaldie. He is no longer worried about what he’ll do: the stakes have all been taken out of his life. Aurelio isn’t the first person Casimir sleeps with, but he is the first person Casimir sleeps with that he loves.   
  
Once he wakes up in Aurelio’s bed and finds the candles still burning and Aurelio frowning down at him, a strange look on his face.   
  
“What are you doing?” Casimir murmurs, and spits hair out of his mouth, a little embarrassed.   
  
“Nothing,” Aurelio says.   
  
“Something,” Casimir insists crossly, and scrubs discreetly at his chin, to get rid of any dried spittle.   
  
“Just, uh,” Aurelio hesitates, then gives an elegant little shrug. “Memorizing you.”  
“Surely you have something better to do with your time,” Casimir says, making a face.  
  
Aurelio laughs at him. “Romantic as ever.”   
  
Casimir doesn’t say it, because he’s learning to be less cruel, but he thinks to himself that Aurelio is still very young, and if he remembers Casimir when he is Casimir’s own age it will be faintly.   
  
The next time Casimir sees Aurelio is about a year later, in Edetska. They don’t have time for much more than a drink--Casimir’s on his way to the capitol, and Aurelio is in disguise, on his way to the Ysntine border. But Aurelio catches Casimir’s wrist on their way out of the bar, and tugs him down for a quick kiss in the alley.   
  
“I’ll be in the capitol next month,” Aurelio says, “if you’re still there.”   
  
“Look me up,” Casimir agrees, sweeping his hand briefly along Aurelio’s jaw as he gets up from his knees.  
That’s the last time they see each other.  


13.  
  
Ilaina doesn’t think to tell anyone, really: they were Cas’s family, and they were there when he died. They’re a bit preoccupied with their own grief, after that. She’s focused on holding herself together.   
  
So it comes as a nasty shock when she turns a corner in a street in Kyov and comes face to face with Aurelio.   
  
He smiles up at her. “Been a while, thief. Here for the Czar’s scepter, or just his head?”  
  
 _Jukkele, Casimir,_ she thinks, with a fresh stab of grief. _Fuck you for making me do this_.  
  
But then, if anyone knows what it’s like to lose the person they love too early even with lifespans that go on too long--  
  
“I think I owe you a drink,” she says. “My treat, all night. You’ll want it.”  
  
14.  
  
Two hundred years later, Aurelio marries a pretty Dwarvish lad from Gatolunya. It’s a love match. They’re happy together.  Aurelio very rarely speaks about his first love, although when he does, he is always fond.  
  
He doesn’t forget a damn thing.   
  
Aurelio’s husband lives in the same city in heaven, in a house with his first wife and the child that died with her. They see each other in the street on occasion, and they embrace, but they don’t miss each other.   
  
It is heaven, after all.   
  
15.

  
Casimir finds himself in a familiar white room. An old woman straightens up at her desk, looking at him with a wry expression.   
  
“Well?” she asks, and gestures to the three gates behind her. “Which will it be?”  
  
“I want to see her again,” Casimir says, and walks through the gate to heaven.   
  
She’s waiting for him, even more beautiful than the painted icons that remain of her on Earth: brown-skinned, enormous-eyed, cloud of black hair curling behind her pointed ears. When she sees him she breaks out into a brilliant smile. “ _Dad_ ,” she says, and just like that, Casimir is home.  


**Author's Note:**

> if you read this and i'm not on a 24/7 groupchat with you: B L E S S


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